Stupid and Cheap

Okay...back to the basics...My father told me you can't be stupid and cheap...
Now what does that mean? well he explained...if your stupid you need lots of money to pay people to do the stuff you don't know how to do, and if your cheap you better be really smart!

This goes for customers too. I wonder what people negotiate today when they hire a consulting firm to do anything? I mean really, if you had the skill then you would not need them would you? (there goes my dad's saying again)

Ok one more thing, not to take any shots at the globalization of consulting, but lets be real...Why does Anyone think that the "process, localization, consultative skills" required for successful implementations can be done remotely or even with "technology skills" I mean heres an example, one of my best friends Meenagi Venkat who s now a VP at IBM (but was the best ever SAP consultant that ever lived) told a story one day in front of a client..s BIG client, in the Telecom industry, starts with a V.

Well, many of the vendors were talking about their "offshore" consulting headcount.
One said they had 10,000 SAP CONSULTANTS, (already using the consulting word was an insult), and others said 5,7,4, thousands of consultants...So Meenagi ask the client to just follow the math...(it was 2000 when this occurred, but the number would not change that significantly)

He said "lets assume that Indian companies, EMEA or North American based companies had done 200 SAP implementations in India over the last 5 years, and lets say that no consultant ever repeated on any engagement, and lets say the avg size of the SAP team was 20 team members, how many Indian based (life cycle experienced) SAP consultants are there? Simple math says 4000 right, but would you call a (1) life cycle person a consultant? Not me...

Anyway...clients have brought doom upon themselves, commoditizing skills and putting success at risk every time,,,

PS I don't care if its India,Russia,Romania,Vietnam or China..its all bull unless you dive deeper...

But I guess you can be stupid and cheap Dad...god rest his soul...

Listen close someone is always lying

So I forgot to get on and post the IBM and Oracle ...Sun debacle..

Sun did fine, lots of guys at the top richer than ever , but as usual the people in the trenches that kept Sun alive are being cast aside..

on the IBM front, Palmisano was throwing furniture over losing JAVA...his people screwed this up big time...if your portfolio and integration effort was so JAVA focused (geez IBM had more Java Developers than Sun did) then you can't fathom why they would not have just paid the 5 bucks more????

Reminds me of the book Bib Blues, good reading if you want to watch the mistakes that IBM made over the years, includes xerography patent, RISC proceesors, DOS/Windows, Intel bailout, Wang bailout...and so much more we can cover some of this in the blog one day....

But back to missing Java. Larry Ellison will monetize and license Java and make IBM miserable, its not open source so he can somewhat do what he wants..and the IBM Websphere stack will be in a nuclear holocaust!

So Larry laughs, Suns top guys get rich(er) IBM gets screwed and the Sun little people get wiped.. all in all exactly how the world works bad guys win again...(gee does that mean IBM is good guys? lets not take the leap yet)


Tomorrow we talk about the CLOUD.....hahahaha I'm laughing already